 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke. The last two days we've started to talk about programming. We've talked about microcycles and we've talked about mesocycles. Now what we want to do is we want to step back and take a broad look at training in general. And so if I have, let's give in a fake event for this, just for learning purposes. Let's say we have somebody who's training for a marathon. And right now it's January and there are marathons at the beginning of December. First, awesome, that's a lot of time. And second, all of my training between now and beginning of December when the race happens is considered one macro cycle. It is our big picture view of programming. We are orienting all of our mesocycles in this macro cycle to get us prepared for that race day. That's what a macro cycle is. If you have a team sport athlete, you're not doing a whole macro cycle for every game that they play. Let's say you're an NHL athlete and you play, I think they still play 82 games per year. You're not going to have peak performance at every single one of those games. Let's keep going through this. I need pre-programmed rest if I'm going to be prepared for a game. Training makes you fatigued. And if I'm testing, if I'm playing, if I'm competing, then I don't want that much fatigue. I don't have a hard training session the day of a competition because I don't want to be fatigued for it. I want to be able to demonstrate everything that I could possibly demonstrate physically from my body. If you're an ice hockey athlete and you play three games in a week, you can kind of take little dips in training, like 24 hours before, 12 hours before maybe, 24 hours hopefully, little dips in training that will allow you to recover a little bit and then compete really hard and then you'll get another dip. You can even train right after the competition so that you can focus on some of the other qualities that you want to train while you're fatigued. And that allows you to get more training sessions in, it's not really training sessions, it's more training volume in the same amount of training sessions with these logistical, we've talked about our microcycles before, logistical limitations that we have. So there's that, there's competitions throughout the week and we have basically this wave of ability. My ability is on this y-axis and then time is on this x-axis. As my training goes up, my ability goes down and as I rest, my ability goes up and then I have a competition and my ability goes down and then I train and my ability maybe goes down a little bit more and then I rest and then my ability comes back up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's this little like a wave, sine wave almost, that hopefully climbs upward as it goes rightward. And that's how we know that our training is actually doing something. If I can measure something and by the end of the year I'm better at it than when I started at the beginning of the year then I know that training has done something. Now, in this team sport example, I have these microcycle peaks, these little waves here but there's also one piece of the year of the macrocycle that I need to peak for and I need to decide where the end of the macrocycle is. And so if you're a team and you're not really sure if you're going to make the playoffs then maybe that peak comes right before the end of the regular season because I need to be in tip-top shape to make sure I can even have a chance at playing in the playoffs. If you are the defending playoff champs and your team has not changed at all then you're probably pretty sure you're going to make the playoffs and you don't want to peak during the season because you don't need to be, you know, it helps to be the number one seed but you're probably already going to be number one or two seed then it's not that I don't want to peak for training in the season I want to peak for training after the season during the playoffs so that I can, you know, when I reach these better teams when I play against these better teams, I can reach higher levels of our physical ability as a team. Okay, so that's what the team sport example looks like. I thought of that one and I just started with it. It's kind of difficult. A more challenging, easier way to look at it is I have an Olympic athlete and my macro cycle is four years long and I peak for the Olympics, you know. Now, in building a macro cycle I have a bunch of little pieces that we talked about yesterday that are meso cycles. So it's the block of training. It's each program of training. It's each particular adaptation that I want that builds upon the previous ones. And so in general, we look at three main types of blocks. So I can accumulate volume and we've talked about, you know, we talked about rep ranges a few days back if I have more volume, probably have higher rep ranges I'm probably looking into hypertrophy and endurance type stuff. And then we have, we call the volume blocks, we call accumulation blocks. And then if I'm trying to push intensity really high if I'm having higher weights or moving things faster then we tend to, you know, we're training strength or power because we talked about those rep ranges before we call those blocks intensification blocks. And each one produces its own different type of fatigue and generally they build upon each other. Remember that pyramid of physical ability that we have the accumulation stuff is generally down here by my thumbs at the base of the pyramid and then the intensification stuff is usually up here at the top. That's being able to demonstrate my peak physical ability. So in general it's like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, strength, and power up at the top. Power or speed up at the top. So usually I am going to alternate I'm going to spend most of my time alternating accumulation blocks and intensification blocks. I do the accumulation first because it's that base part of the pyramid and then I do the intensification after because then I can build upon I can use that new accumulation progression that I've gotten and I can build upon it. Then their third type of block we is called the transmutation block or maybe just a peaking block. And so in there I'm sticking to my volume is diving down because volume fatigues me. My volume dives down so that my physical ability can come back up so that I'm not super fatigued, but I keep intensity relatively high. Usually it takes a little bit of a dip because I don't want to push my body to the brink of its physical abilities at this point. And I want to but I want to keep the strength and the power and the motor unit recruitment that I've already built. So, you know, I might do accumulation intensification accumulation intensification transmutation. And so this transmutation block might just be three weeks instead of four to six to eight weeks. And it's just an opportunity for my body to recover and it happens right before I have that competition that major point of the macro cycle that we've talked about. So everything, you know, it works better if you plan backwards if you start at the end and then you go backwards. And so you say, okay, if I need to do my marathon in the first week of December, then I'm going to need three weeks to peak. Then I'm probably going to want to come off of a running specific intensification program. And then I'm going to want to come off a accumulation program and then I can kind of just alternate intensification accumulation up until then in general over the macro cycle. I am generally going to get more specific. I'm going to get less general in my training. So if I'm training for a marathon, I'm going to start running a lot more and lifting a lot less. But as I'm in January here waiting until the December race starts, I can do more lifting and I can use that to support again that base part of that adaptation pyramid we've been talking about. Hopefully that gives you some input into how to structure a macro cycle.